3D Printing News and Innovation

Turning digital ideas into physical reality is not without its challenges, so Shapeways is starting the year off with an incredible new tool to make 3D printing even easier. Shapeways’ Wall Thickness Tool gives you instant feedback at upload to improve your model by detecting areas that are below our Thin Walls thresholds for each material offered.

This version of Wall Thickness Visualization surfaces a warning when any wall is below the minimum threshold for a given material. You will see a small ‘See Thin Walls’ warning on your Model Edit page for any models that may contain problem areas. Clicking on the ‘See Thin Walls’ warning will open a modal dialog that surfaces warnings for that material in orange, as well as the relevant design guidelines to make it easier to improve.

WHAT’S EVEN BETTER? As of today, you will be able to run Wall Thickness Visualization on ANY of your existing models with the click of a button: the “Check Wall Thickness” button on your Model Edit page.

While this is an automated check to help you diagnose issues with your model, our 3D Printing Engineers will still manually check your model for Wall Thickness and other structural strength issues once you purchase.

It’s never been so easy to get into 3D modeling and bringing your ideas to life! You can now view how to fix a previously rejected model, or get instant feedback to improve your model BEFORE you even order it. It’s our first big tool for makers this year, and trust us, there’s a lot more still to come!

The key to this functionality is WebGL support in your browser – see if you can enable that in opera:config (you may also have to enable hardware acceleration support – if in doubt, do a search for “webgl” on dev.opera.com).

but the tools is not exactly accurate since many models that are “below” the wall thicknes, are still printable and work as intended, is usefull, yes, but not the last word on what can be or not printed